Eric Weil was born in Parchim (Mecklembourg) in 1904; he studied medicine and philosophy in Hamburg and Berlin. Following his 1928 PhD thesis on Pomponazzi, under the supervision of Ernst Cassirer, he carried on his research on the Renaissance period, mainly focusing on Marsile Ficin, in theKulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg(Aby Warburg Library). In 1933, as a consequence of Hitler’s rise to power, he left Germany. In Paris, he also took part in A. Koyré’s Recherches Philosophiques and in A. Kojève’s seminar on Hegel, and he completed a dissertation on Pic de la Mirandole (Picco della Mirandola) at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE). He acquired French citizenship in 1938. Conscripted under the name of Henri Dubois, he was made a prisoner in June 1940 and was imprisoned in a stalag for nearly 5 years in Germany.

After he was released, he took part with Georges Bataille in the founding and the editing of Critique, a journal for which he himself wrote many articles. In the following years, he published his great work of ontology, Logique de la Philosophie in 1950 and Philosophie Morale in 1961, as well as a great number of essays and he gave numerous conferences on ontology, on the philosophy of praxis and of history, and the history of philosophy. Some were collected and published in book-form: Hegel and the State (1950), Problèmes kantiens (1963), Essais et conférences (1970).

From 1956 to 1968, he taught philosophy at the University of Arts and Humanities of Lille, then at the University of Arts and Humanities of Nice from 1968 to 1974. Eric Weil died on February 1, 1977.